Vida Ventsene of the Soviet Union, a 23-year-old student in only her third season of international racing, held off 36-year-old teammate Raisa Smetanina by 8.7 seconds to win the women's 10-kilometer cross-country ski race and earn the first gold medal of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada. Ventsene completed the course, which is about 6.2 miles, in 30 minutes 8.3 seconds to earn her first major international title. Smetanina, a four-time Olympian, finished in 30:17.

Friday Opening ceremony: Dixie Chicks and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Sting and Yo-Yo Ma welcome athletes from more than 80 nations. Let the Games begin. But they've already begun with qualifying earlier in the day in ski jumping's K-90. Saturday Figure skating: Russians challenged in pairs short program. Speedskating: Dutch treat in the men's 5,000. Cross-country skiing: First gold medal of the Games goes to winner of women's 15K freestyle.

While his team is playing in Japan, Paul Kariya works out on his own, far away. Haven't we been through this before? We're right back to where the hockey season began, when the Mighty Ducks and Vancouver Canucks made a promotional trip to Tokyo and Kariya, stuck in a contract stalemate, stayed home in Canada. Only this time Kariya isn't at fault. Not one bit. Blame the NHL, which lets goons take free shots at its superstars with only minor repercussions.

They handed out the medals in women's luge Wednesday. Anne Abernathy came away empty--or did she? The representative of the Virgin Islands--a hotbed, perhaps, but not of winter sports--might have been a winner merely by competing, certainly by finishing. At 44 years and 305 days on Wednesday, nearly three times as old as Tara Lipinski and already known as Grandma Luge, she became the oldest female competitor to complete her event in Winter Olympics history.

It is Day 3 at the 1998 Nagano Winter Games . . . and do you know where the Olympics went? Downhill skiers aren't skiing. Snowboarders have stopped snowboarding. Lugers are whining when they should be luging, working themselves up into a frothing lather over (repeat after me: This is real sport, this is a real sport . . . ) a pair of booties. Cross-country skiers--the poor, lost souls of Nagano--were last seen mushing off into the blizzard, hoping to someday be seen alive again.

Jutta Kleinschmidt of Germany became the first woman Sunday to win the Dakar Rally, a grueling endurance race of 6,658 miles that began in Paris on New Year's Day. Kleinschmidt and co-pilot Andreas Schulz unexpectedly overtook two-time winner Jean-Louis Schlesser. The French driver was given a one-hour penalty in the 20th and final stage for unsportsmanlike conduct. In the motorcycle class, Fabrizio Meoni of Italy won his first Dakar title.

The red, white and blue Games of Salt Lake City added gold, silver and bronze to the color scheme here Monday when the young U.S. men's snowboarding team swept their sport's marquee event. The sweep was the first by an American Winter Olympic team since 1956, taking place before a wildly enthusiastic home crowd that swelled to as many as 30,000 when the morning women's downhill event was postponed by high winds.

For most of the afternoon and into the evening, the crowds that lined the frozen track to watch the men's luge competition seemed sparse and hushed. It wasn't until the final slider arrived at the start house that an honest-to-goodness roar erupted from the grandstands, a noise that seemed too loud for the 3,000 or so in attendance.

A sheriff has urged a prosecutor to consider charging Derrick Thomas in a highway wreck that killed a passenger and left the Kansas City Chief linebacker paralyzed from the chest down. But Clay County, Mo., Prosecutor Don Norris said he did not plan an investigation of the Jan. 23 crash on Interstate 435. Icy snow was falling at the time, and Norris said he viewed the accident as weather-related. "I'm not ruling anything out," Norris said.